During my first year flying the Jeddah Hajj, the Muslim Pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina, the excitement soon gave way to the boredom of routine.
Islam, I am told, is a wonderful religion. One of its tenets decrees that a Muslim must make at least one Hajj, Pilgrimage, during his lifetime, in order to get to Heaven. This requires a visit to the three holy sites. Two of these Holiest Islamic sites, all part of the ritual of the Hajj, are located in the Magic Kingdom, Saudi Arabia. King Fand and his family are the official Custodians of these Holiest of Muslim Holies, located in the cities of Mecca and Medina.
Saudis, by virtue of arbitrary geography, (thanks to T.E. Lawrence and the Brits) play host to two million Muslims a year, all entering and leaving through the Hajj Terminal, a corner of King Abdul Azziz Airport in Jeddah; and all this during a three-month period each year. As the Landlords of Islam’s holy sites, the Saudis look down their prodigious noses at the Foreign Muslims, who travel from all over the Muslim World to make the Pilgrimage.
The deal to enter Saudi Arabia, The Kingdom (The Magic Kingdom to most of us, or The Sand-Box), is that you must be invited, you must obtain a visa, you must be sponsored by a Saudi company… this all requires a lot of time and patience… oh, and you must not be Jewish. I am Jewish…. though most of my colleagues don’t know it.
Each year, when assigned to fly the sandbox, every crewmember must fill out a million forms to have the entry visa stamp affixed to their passports. One of these forms asks for religion, and an answer is required. No answer, no entry visa!
The first year I was a Catholic, the next (off of probation) I became a Druid. This year, feeling feisty, I listed myself as a Pedophile.
A day long wait in an airport holding area in Jeddah is commonplace, while strutting Saudis with clip-boards disappear with your passport. They may only take a few hours, between meals and prayers, and return Inshallah, with your passport and visa.
As hard as it is to enter the Magic Kingdom, leaving is even more difficult. You must first get an exit letter from the Saudi government, before you can even attempt to leave. Think of the movie Casablanca. Ingrid Bergman, her Resistance-Hero husband, and the entire population of the city, it seems, is trying to get exit letters. The letter cannot be obtained until you can prove to the Saudi’s that you owe no money to your hotel or to anyone else, that your sponsor is allowing you to leave, and that you have paid passage out, already in hand.
Effectively, we are hostages in a very hostile land. The majority of the population detests our presence. We are non-believing, infidel devils, here to do their work, yet polluting their culture. Osama Bin Laden, heir to a Saudi fortune, is bent on driving the American Satan ( us ) from Saudi Arabia. He, and other Muslim extremists, have the resolve to kill us, but are still working on the means ( weapons of mass destruction ). We have the power and the means, but not yet the will to fight their kind of fight, at least not yet. Most Americans have no idea to what extent these people hate us, and would do anything to destroy us and our way of life… but we are stuck here, for the money.
Eventually, even these exotic new destinations become mundane….. Jeddah to Algiers and back, Jeddah to Medina and back, Jeddah to Damascus and back….. the problem was the “and back.” We flew to Delhi, Bombay, Karachi, Lahore, Islamabad, Dhaka, you name it, we went there, and back!
For us flying prisoners of Jeddah, breakfast became the highlight of our days. A wall-to-wall buffet of eggs, beans, rice, fruit, cheeses, and more, was available all morning. The local daily, The Arab News, was read over coffee, each morning. This slanted rag, the Royal Family’s personal Pravda, is so transparently biased, that it became our focal point of amusement, written for our personal pleasure.
One popular feature was “Ask Achmed,” a religious column dealing with the nit-picky issues of Islamic fundamentalism:
Dear Achmed:
My ten-year-old son likes to draw figures in art class. I discourage him, or try to get him to separate the heads from the torsos. His art teacher says this is not necessary in an art class. Am I right in Islamic law?
Dear Mrs. Metuffah W.: You are correct. As you know, Islamic law forbids the drawing of full figures of people or animals. Therefore, try to get your son to draw geometric patterns or landscapes. If he insists on drawing figures, make sure he separates the heads from the bodies. Talk to the school administration about this art teacher, since he is leading children away from the correct Islamic path.
Tired of our Kingdom prison, we fantasize aloud the ways we intend to escape the Saudi sand-box. We have been advised by Saudia, for whom we fly the Hajj contract, that no one will be allowed to go home during the hiatus, the break between the first and second “wave” of the Hajj. We will all be stuck out her for the full ninety days… not going home, not seeing family for three months.
I’ve just finished reading the “Ask Achmed” column, and I say: “I know how I’ll get out of here. I’m going to start an “Ask the Rabbi” column in the Arab News. Maybe I’ll even put a classified ad in the Arab News, “Rabbi available to give Bar Mitzvah lessons at the Sofitel Hotel, room 206."
None of my companions yet know that I’m a Jew, since there are no Jewish pilots, they think it’s a joke.
Mark Lippi laughs, and volunteers that he’s sure I’ll be out of the Kingdom real soon. “Rabbi,” Mark says, “you can be the Chief Rabbi of Saudi Arabia… briefly!”
“Yeah, Rabbi, they’ll ship you home head first …body to follow!”
The other guys all add their comments, and I am forever dubbed “The Rabbi.” This nickname is particularly amusing to me, as the secret in-kingdom Jew. It’s a joke on the Saudi’s as well, but it’s a more subtle joke on my (mostly) Jew-hating comrades.
The real joke is of course on me. Loving, and being loved by a group of guys who might hate me, if they knew my hidden label, is tough to live with. The worm always eats at my soul, when I allow the anti-Semitic venom to lap around me, without fessing up. I am, after all, selling out my mother and father, my kids and all my family for acceptance, which for all I know might be mine, regardless.
Sitting in the midst of these friends, some my undeserved enemies, my mind plays with the ancient riddle. Jew, Jewish, Semite; Sand-nigger, Mockie, Kike; God, Hatred, Love and Death. How the fuck do any people get from God and Love, to Hatred and Death?
My mind wanders further back now, back to my earliest recollections.
“Stevie, I’d like you to meet your Uncle Harry, and Uncle Benny, and this is Uncle Moishe. Your uncle Davie is still in the hospital, but you’ll meet him today when we visit.” I was five years old, and World War II had ended. My mother had nine brothers and sisters, and all the men had been away for the duration. I was now meeting my uncles, my new-met heroes, for the first time.
This vivid scene has stuck with me through all the years, as only certain childhood memories do. The significance of what I was witnessing didn’t register ‘til well into my adulthood. Only my father, with two kids, and bad vision, had remained behind. All the other uncles and uncles-in-law had been off fighting the Nazi’s and the Japanese. Remarkably all eight of them had come home alive.
Moishe, a strapping, natural athlete, had been a Pacific marine, who landed on Tarawa and Iwo Jima. God knows what he saw and did, since he’s a quiet man, who settled down, raised a family, started a business and never talked to any of us about the war.
Davie, the uncle who was finally released from St. Albans Naval Hospital months later, had been a radio operator on a bomber in the Pacific. He and his five crewmates lived, played and flew together. For years, they fought their missions, marauding the Japanese fleet. During the last of their missions, towards the end of the Pacific campaign, they were blown out of the sky.
My Uncle Dave’s chute somehow opened, and he was machine gunned across his throat and down one leg, while dangling unconscious in the parachute harness. A navy PBY swooped in and plucked him from the ocean, flying him to an American held island base. Business at the field hospital was light that day, so the triage surgeon allowed him to be worked on. He was the only member of his crew to survive. This story comes to me from his wife, my aunt Helen, since I’ve never heard war stories from Davie, either.
The rest of my uncles, all Jews, of course, fought in the Italian, French and German campaigns. Except for the foreign coins they gave me (very exotic stuff for a kid at the time), I never heard a word about the war from any of them. Years later, I learned of the family members back in Germany and Poland, whose correspondence suddenly stopped, forever.
The family was very close, all living within walking distance of each other, and this large, ethnic clan would kibitz, and scrap, tease and laugh over impossibly large meals, bustled to the table by my Grandma Minnie, my mom, and aunts. I had tens of cousins close in age to play with, and the warmth and camaraderie was an encapsulating cocoon of love and support.
In the nineteen fifties, The Bronx, New York, was a peaceful blend of Jews, Irish, and Italians. My being Jewish was no big deal. Although my family, especially on my father’s side, was orthodox, the fact that I was Jewish had been only that to me, just another fact. I was male, American, a kid, and I also happened to also be Jewish. I thought everybody’s home had meat dishes, milk dishes (milchiks and fleyshiks), along with the Passover plates, pots and pans, to be used only for that occasion.
It wasn’t until I was about nine-or-so, and being sent to Hebrew school, that the loathing and terror of my Jewishness took root, quickly consuming, and finally overwhelming any spirituality I might ever have developed.
The Rabbis that taught Hebrew school at Temple Beth Elohim made it very clear from the beginning. We Jews were God’s chosen people. I was given no choice, I was chosen, period. That being initially (and continually) emphasized, we were taught the litany of cruel tortures and deaths that Jews over the centuries had suffered to retain their Jewish ness, this “privilege” of being God’s Chosen. From the flaying alive of Rabbi Akiva, the tortures of the Spanish inquisition, to the pograms throughout history, all culminating with that grandest of grand finales, Hitler’s Nazis, and their European executioners.
By the 1950’s, when I was the student-target of this mayhem of information, all the facts were in. We were treated to detailed accounts of the atrocities committed at the various extermination camps. We were shown the pictures of the piles of gold teeth pulled from Jewish mouths, the piles of Jewish hair used to stuff mattresses, the stockpile of soaps made from Jewish bones. I was treated to all this horror, and told to be proud to be Jewish, and to resist to the death any attempt to un-Jew me. The films of the concentration camps’ Jewish inmates were particularly unforgettable as a nine, ten and eleven-year-old. “Never again” was the watchword, “Not me!” became my motto.
As a result of the mind I was born with, the sensibilities of delicate youth, and these wonderful examples of the positive nature of religion, I was thoroughly traumatized. At once, I was ashamed of being Jewish ( why didn’t those millions of people defend themselves and their children? ), terrified of being Jewish ( I never, ever admit to being Jewish under ordinary circumstances ), and had no use for God — mine or anyone else’s.